


Load Bearing

by nirejseki



Series: Slices of Life [3]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Criminal husbands, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, So Married
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-17
Updated: 2016-03-17
Packaged: 2018-05-27 06:57:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6274342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mick has fun.  Then he doesn't.  </p>
<p>(Coldwave Week 2016: Wildcard, aka "well it didn't fit any of the other categories so I guess it goes here")</p>
            </blockquote>





	Load Bearing

“Mick, get back here!” 

Mick rolls his eyes, shooting the heat gun along the wall and watching with delight as it catches fire. God, as far as presents go, this heat gun is absolutely his favorite. It can roast just about anything. 

He can still hear Len ragging on him, telling him to get back to the job. Mick loves the little punk, but Len could talk a man to death without having the decency to go even a little hoarse. So what if he's taking a small detour from the stupid plan? It's not that it was a bad plan – Mick respects Len's plans, they're usually pretty good even if Len is ridiculous about getting the details right – but that type of cheap wood paneling is basically kindling if you've got the right equipment. Which Mick definitely has. God, it's so beautiful watching it go up like that. 

Besides, Len is going to go in after the safe in the other room. Mick's job was always going to be to keep an eye out and cause a distraction if necessary; so what if he started the distraction part a little early? Len didn't need help cracking the safe. And Mick loved so much the fact that that was an entirely literal cracking - that cold gun of Len's would make it brittle enough that a strong kick should do it. He might not think much of Len's absurd theatrics or tendency to try to go up against the Flash instead of going for the score, but the guns go a real long way to sell him on the whole thing.

There's a loud crack and Mick turns around. Huh, looks like he was wrong about the cheap wood paneling. Not about how well it went up in flames – he hasn't been wrong about that since fifteen-year-old Len dropped a bunch of science type books on his bed with all the sections about fire highlighted and annotated in painstaking detail, because Len is a fucking geek but gives the best presents. But definitely wrong about the wood being just the paneling, because wow, that wall is just crumpling in on itself. Cheap wood all the way through. Another crack, an ominous rumble, and Mick looks up.

Looks like the wall he just torched was load-bearing. Shit, now the ceiling's coming down. 

Mick waits until the right moment and jumps backwards, avoiding the crash of a portion of the ceiling. Just a piece of it, luckily, though the cracks extend well past the doorway and he can hear other portions of the building start to crack. What sort of rich person lives in a place this shitty anyway? Len had better be right about the take in that safe. 

Mick amuses himself for another few minutes torching the piece of the ceiling that just fell down. Not as flammable as the walls – he has to aim his gun at it for a few minutes, but everything burns eventually. Ceiling keeps dropping large pieces of plaster, but nothing as big as the chunks from the first round. He's gotten almost the entire room on fire before he remembers that he promised Len not to be in the middle of a room on fire again. 

Actually, now that he thinks of it, it's kinda weird Len hasn't marched in to yell at him and drag him out. Len always did fancy himself Mick's control switch, and Mick's maybe been relying on that a bit much recently. His shrink's been talking about co-dependency and the need for control to come from the inside a lot more than usual recently; that's usually a sign of it. 

Huh. Listening over the crackling of the flames, it occurs to Mick that he can't hear Len talking at all. Did the bastard ditch him again? He isn't even on fire this time! 

Giving the furnace he's created a last, longing look, he turns and heads to the other room to check if Len got the stuff out of the safe before heading off or if he should pick it up himself. 

Safe's empty, that's the first thing he sees. Room isn't. _Shit._

Len's lying prone on the ground, fingers still curled loosely around the hilt of his gun; he's half-covered in rubble from the ceiling. Looks like he got hit by the first wave of the collapse and went down, which best case here means he's been unconscious for a hell of a lot longer than Mick would like. Probably was just lying here getting rained on by plaster bits and nails while Mick was off torching the other room.

It feels like his brain's just whited out there for a second, staring at his partner and not being able to tell from this distance if he's breathing or not. This was not supposed to happen. Not ever; Len's best selling point has always been that he's far too cold to burn.

It takes a minute to dig Len out without using the heat gun – he's not going to risk lighting Len on fire – and another to get up the guts to roll him over so Mick can check his pulse. Len's lips are obscenely red right now, and he must have gotten cut somewhere because the half of his face that was facing the ground is caked with dried blood. He looks like an extra in a horror movie.

But he's breathing. 

Mick catches his breath, fingers tightening on Len's shoulders until he's pretty sure he's giving his partner some fresh bruises on top of the ones he's already got. Bastard deserves it for nearly giving him a heart attack. Breathing. That's good. As long as Len's still got that one down, they can work on the rest later. Right before Mick strangles him for not watching his back and getting taken out by fucking ceiling plaster.

Watching his back was supposed to be Mick's job tonight. But that thought isn't helping anyone, so he's just going to ignore it. 

It doesn't take that much effort to pick Len up – Len isn't a small guy by any means, they're about the same height and they're both over six feet, but he's always felt strangely light to Mick. Like his bones are hollow or something. Mick gets them both out the back door and into the perfectly placed get-away car (Len's attention to details is sometimes really useful), dumping Len in the back seat just as he starts to hear sirens.

He still takes the extra second to buckle Len in, because Len is weird about that sort of thing. Only crew he's ever worked with where assault with a deadly was boys being boys but not buckling up was potential grounds for exclusion. He doesn't even want to know where Len's head is at sometimes.

Mick drives off in the stupid car that Len picked and he wants desperately to floor it, have this stupid night be over with already, but Len's beaten it into his head a thousand times: if the cops are on their way, they're going to be looking for a get away, so drive slow when every instinct says to drive fast and they'll drive right by you. Sure enough, a harassed lady cop waves him on by, entirely focused on directing traffic away from the fire as the big red engines make their appearance. 

Now for the tough call – hospital or backroom doc? Len was good at making those calls for their crew; no one had ever died from lack of medical care while under his watch. Sure, he'd shoot them for breaking his rules – no one ever said Len wasn't the coldest son of a bitch in the block – but having them die because they needed emergency room care and they only got some asshole with a fake MD and a loose set of morals? Not happening. Hospital had better care and less chance of infection, but the house they'd just taken was Mick's MO to a tee and the cops watched the ERs for shit like this. Hospitals were how stupid people got caught. But if he took him to the doc down the shitty side of Viewpoint Boulevard, Len might die on an operating table and then Mick would have to burn the entire city of Central down in order to escape the memories.

Damnit, it wasn't his job to make these calls. That's why he kept Len around. It sure as hell wasn't for the bastard's big mouth. 

Though it did feel wrong driving in a car with Len not monologuing away. He'd started to notice that about cars, even when they weren't working together – they seemed weirdly roomy and quiet in a way he would swear they hadn't been before. He'd even found himself thinking about turning on talk radio to fill the space, which was just wrong. He should probably check in with his shrink sometime about that; she was always ragging on him to be aware of new behavior mechanisms. 

Len sitting in the back seat instead of the passenger side, quiet like dead but for the soft little wheeze when he exhaled? Some things were just not meant to be.

Mick wanted to light something on fire. He wanted it real bad. If Len was going to die anyway, leave him behind on some stupid shit job that Mick didn't even remember checking to see if they'd gotten the score before hurrying out, Mick should've just stayed back there in the burning building. Sat there and watched it all go down one last time.

There was a low gurgling cough from the back seat. Sounded more like rinsing toothpaste than breathing.

“Mhm..Mic..k?”

Shit, Lenny was awake! 

“Your pain tolerance is something I've always admired about you,” he said, twisting back and grinning over his shoulder at his partner. His _living_ partner. 

Len stared at him through dull eyes that probably meant a concussion, flopping his hand around a little in a way that has absolutely no meaning in any possible interpretation but somehow still perfectly translated to 'Goddamnit, Mick, keep your eyes on the fucking road when you're driving'. 

“Yeah, yeah. Hey, we're coming up on the turn – you need a hospital?”

There was a moment of quiet as Len contemplated this, trying to gauge his injuries. The answer was always going to be 'no', because Len had a distaste for hospitals that spoke of childhood trauma and mandatory reporter rules, but if he thought about the answer for more than a minute then he probably needed to go to one anyway. 

“Nn...nah.” That was about 30 seconds, which meant possible broken bones but no internal bleeding that Len could detect in Len-speak. “L..larkin?”

Yeah, that made sense. As far as docs that serviced the underworld, Larkin was one of the better ones, mostly because he was being very well paid by the various mob families in the city to keep his office clean and to ask no questions. He was more expensive than some of the other options and Mick would have to keep an eye on the door to make sure no Santinis were thinking of getting a bit back in what was nominally a neutral zone, but it was still better than Mick trying to patch Len up himself with a first aid kit and a bottle of whiskey. Or Rodriguez. Fucking Rodriguez. Whatever med school that fucker had gotten himself into should be sued for malpractice. 

“It that bad?” he asked, making the turn to head in the direction of Larkin's practice and increasing his speed to something more comfortable. The trash cans rattled as he blew past them.

“C...course n-n-not. Just c-checking.”

Mick felt a stab of guilt. Len hated stuttering; apparently he'd done it as a little kid before he'd kicked the habit somehow. A solid beat down wasn't enough to make it come out, which meant that Mick had managed to find yet another one of Len's hidden triggers somehow. Len had a whole set of them that made no sense from any reasonable standpoint, but Mick wasn't judging – his shrink's folder on him was the size of a brick. He should probably drag Len to see the shrink again, come to think of it. Could maybe help with his self-destructive Flash fetish.

That was always the way with the two of them; Len was self-destructive while Mick tended to skip the self-reflection and go straight to the outright destructive. Mick glanced in the rearview mirror at his partner, who looked like he was seriously thinking about passing out again. Destructive. Times like this he couldn't find it in himself to be proud of that. 

He gets to the doc's place and twists the car into the approximate equivalent of a parking space with a shriek of the brakes. Then he glances back and has to scramble to get the back door open before Len throws up, which is disgusting but at least it's on the ground – that means they don't have to immediately ditch the car and possibly torch it, because Mick is sure as hell not going to sit in a car with someone's vomit and he doesn't feel like anyone else should have to, either.

Mick gets Len into the building and onto the doc's table with a minimum of fuss, then goes and rouses the doc himself with somewhat more fuss. It's not until he's got a gun under the doc's chin while explaining why, exactly, Larkin should get up at two in the morning for someone not under contract to one of the Families, that he hears the quiet buzz and realizes he's holding the cold gun instead of his heat gun, which is still safely strapped onto his thigh. He thinks about that for a second – it seems oddly significant, though he can't figure out exactly why – but then decides that thinking is overrated and just drags the doc into the other room.

A few hours of watching the door later – and playing around a bit with the cold gun, which is surprisingly awesome for something not fire-related, he sees why Len likes it so much – Larkin sticks his head out the door warily. 

Mick puts his feet down on the ground and sits straight up. “Well?”

“Your partner will be fine. He's got a fairly nasty concussion, but not bad enough to the point that I have to do something about it. He broke a rib and punctured a lung with it; it looks like it'll probably heal fine on it's own if he doesn't mess around with it. But that's the worst of it, though I gave him a tetanus booster because you said something about him being rained on by nails. Also, he keeps complaining about his left arm, but there's nothing wrong with it that I can see outside a couple of bruises and cuts.”

Mick nods – as a kid, Len broke his left arm at least three times that Mick knows about and it's always going to be screwed up, but it's probably just a pulled muscle that Len's worrying over because some stupid emergency room doc once told him he might lose the use of the hand if he kept breaking it and Len's been paranoid ever since. “But he'll get over it? Nothing permanent?”

The doc gave him a dirty look. “He'll need some time to recover, but yes, he'll be fine. I've given him something for the pain – I assume you'll be taking some of that home with you? Again?” Larkin sounded deeply resentful about that fact, but Mick doesn't particularly care. Len hates drugs with a passion, so it's not like they keep it around their safe houses. He boots the doc out of his own office and back upstairs, then goes to face the music. 

Len must have a real bad concussion, because he doesn't start lecturing Mick about abandoning the plan immediately. Nor does he do it in the car. Or when Mick lifts him up and carries him into the safe house. Mick's starting to get a bit antsy about it. That's how it goes between them, Mick fucks something up and Len lectures him and then they get over it. On the rare occasion when Len fucks something up and is willing to admit that it happened, he usually find a way to make it up to Mick. Usually while lecturing him about something, because Len's a control freak like that. 

The lack of lecturing is making Mick start to worry that he's really in for it this time. Len likes maybe four people on the planet and being one of them usually gets Mick out of any serious trouble with him, but if Lisa ever finds out that he broke her brother, he might as well shoot himself and find his way to hell first just to get out of her way. (What the hell was Len thinking, giving her that gold gun? It took less than an hour for her to start making “gold”/“geld” jokes and practicing her very specific aim on one of the male statutes in the park. Len had thought it was funny, too – clear sign of the insanity that apparently accompanies siblings.)

Mick gives Len a few hours to think up something to say, wandering in and out of Len's room to provide an adequate target if Len ever feels like getting around to the lecture part of the evening, but no dice. So, come evening, he pulls up a chair by Len's bed and clears his throat.

Len twists his head to look at him, tilting it to the side in question.

“Uh. How you feeling?”

Len's expression changes to one of incredulous disbelief. Yeah, that opening was about as good as Mick thought it was. Time to bite the bullet. 

“I screwed up the job tonight.”

Len shrugged. “It could have been worse.”

“Uh, huh. You ain't upset about it at all?”

“We got the take, didn't we?”

Mick actually had no idea about that. He couldn't even remember what it was they were stealing.

Len sighs. “It's a seventeenth century ruby and sapphire necklace, Mick, originally owned by -”

“You ain't pissed that I got you hurt?” Mick interrupts. “Or that I screwed up the plan?”

Len uncharacteristically grins at him. “Do you ever listen when I tell you the plan?”

“Sure I do.” Mick defended himself, wondering if Len lost his mind sometime tonight. “I listen right up until you start repeating yourself.” 

“You remember _why_ we decided to steal this specific necklace?”

Mick thought about it, running through the planning meeting. Get in, crack the safe, Mick makes a distraction, they exit the back, then they fence it at – no, wait, they weren't fencing this one, that'd been different. “We give it to whatshername, the mob girl, so she can go to that party or whatever, and in return she gets the rest of the mob families to respect our claim to our square, right?”

“That's right.” Len looks very cheerful. Suspiciously cheerful, even accounting for the morphine. He'd better not be saying what Mick was starting to think he's saying. “And this way I don't have _to_ escort her to said party.”

Yep, that's exactly what he thought. “You're insane, you know that?”

“I hate mob parties, Mick, you know that.” 

“No, you're just nuts. You seriously thinking puncturing a lung is better than a stupid fancy dinner party?”

“Well, no. But now that it's here, I ain't going to complain about it.”

Mick nodded, starting to relax at last. Len was just being his usual inexplicable self; Mick hadn't somehow managed to break everything between them. Then he had a horrifying thought. “Wait. Does that mean _I_ gotta take her to the party? You've got to be kidding me. That's going to be a disaster.”

Len grinned at him, all teeth. “Next time, Mick, you don't want to go? You can _listen to me_ when I tell you what to do – I put plans in place for a reason, it's not like -”

Mick beamed as Len kicked off on explaining, for the millionth time, why everything went better if Mick gave up all independent thought and just listened to him during jobs. Mick would normally tune him out, but the bandages around Len's side and head – all due to him, this time, no way out of that – made him figure he'd better put in some listening this time 'round. It was good to see Len's brain was back to ticking along the way it always did.

Maybe if he kept an eye on Len for the rest of the week, he'd be able to shake off the lingering memories of that awful moment when he'd thought Len had left him behind for good.


End file.
